


Idylls of the King

by FoxNPhoenix



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Agender, Asexual, Flashbacks, Healing PTSD, Intrusive Thoughts, M/M, Nonbinary, Some Fluff, book conservation, demi-pan-romantic, making amends
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-20 03:28:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19985329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FoxNPhoenix/pseuds/FoxNPhoenix
Summary: Aziraphale is nostalgic for the days of Arthur and armor and meeting a specific Black Knight unexpectedly in random fens.  Remembering the hesitation and fear he felt at the time about following his heart, recalling the pain it caused his dearest friend. . . well, it's got him restoring a book that celebrates the best of the era, and looking for ways to mend the wounds his conflicted non-acceptance caused his Dear One.  Seeing  the effects of that oft-re-inflicted soul-wound in Crowley even today, a thousand years later makes Aziraphale want to soothe it all away, and knows he can't.





	1. Compassion and Memory

DEDICATION: To Michael Sheen, who wanted to know where his fanfics were on Twitter 7/22/2019. This effort is respectfully dedicated to you and is produced in gratitude for your exquisitely layered performance of Aziraphale. Your choices in that role effectively freed me from my self-loathing (based in the world’s & my family’s perceptions and behavior toward me as an agender (nonbinary), asexual, and demi-pan-romantic autistic person stuck in an emphatically female looking body) and set me on a path toward radical self acceptance, joy in who, what, and how I am, and a desire to fiercely protect others. Thank you for handing off the flaming sword. I promise to use it responsibly, only to give weight to moral arguments, and to defend those less powerful or privileged than myself. I won’t let War have it. She’s a bitch.  
\----------------------------xx------------------------------------

**Compassion & Memory**

“Oh no, little one!” Aziraphale exclaims in subdued tones, directing his attention to a first edition of Idylls of the King, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. “Who allowed this vicious beast anywhere near you, poor thing?! Well, dear, I have just the treatment for you!” The Principality of the Eastern Gate, Retired, is careful not to set the volume down. Doing so might inspire the rest of the libr . . . bookstore’s stock to offer a home to the voracious creature inhabiting this unfortunate tome. He carries it in his coat pocket for the wander to the work room in the back of the shop, opening windows as he passes them. Once inside the workroom, he unlocks an airtight box filled with paradichloro-benzene crystals and a stand that could easily be used as a cooling rack for biscuits or a drying rack for cups and glasses. The point of the rack’s presence being to allow air (and the gas produced by the crystals) to circulate around the box’s inhabitant until the offending monsters eating the angel’s book expire.

“Here you go, little one. It will be stuffy for a bit, but once we’ve gotten the vermin out of your pages, we will see to your repairs. You'll feel so much better! Perhaps we can read together once you’re well again!” he says, placing the slim volume on the biscuit rack. Closing the box and locking it, the angel pivots toward the workroom door.

“Angel? You busy? Where even are you back here?”

The familiar voice, sinuous and insinuating without ever making an effort to be or do either, feels heavenly on ethereal skin – palpable, as a touch would be to humans, the sound waves a tactile delight. In a moment, he sees the being who holds his deepest adoration. The angel gasps, delighted.

“Crowley!”

Joy’s gentle chaos sings in his sudden brightness, his unrestrained motion; happy hands, jubilant eyes, he looks his friend full in the face; then, bashful, looks away – all movement, all dance - a dance only ever for his Own, his Safe Home.

“How pleasant to see you! I was comforting a book in need. I know you think it’s silly, but it’s Idylls of the King and Tennyson did so lovingly capture some of the lofty intent of Camelot, even if he did miss the reality by a wide mark. And you know how those days were . . . damp, cold, clunking about in slowly rusting metal. I want to remember the beautiful pieces, though. I thought restoring that volume might help me do that. So, what happy chance brings ‘The Existential Dread that is the Black Knight’ to my door?”

Aziraphale notes an increasing warmth in his chest at the charged memory of golden serpents’ eyes lurking behind a well-made black visor. He had done his Delight a disservice then (the warmth dissipates toward a cool feeling he can only describe as deep blue). ‘Poor dear,’ the angel thinks, ‘I really must make that up to him.’ Tucking the remembered melancholic beauty into his heart as if into his waist coat’s inner breast pocket, he focuses more completely on the emphatically alive, dramatically enduring being before him.

“Might I interest you in something warm? Cocoa? Coffee? Tea?”

The Demon Beloved, wearing a physical form exactly as sinuous as their voice would suggest without not being as human-shaped as possible, lounges vertically against the stack of books just beyond the workroom door labeled {THESE CAN BE SOLD – _PERHAPS_ }, doesn’t reply at once. A small cloud of dismay manifests in delicate shoulder hunching, the toe of their snakeskin 'shoe' describing a self-protective sigil in the dust on the floor, and a stout refusal to look up at the gently glowing shopkeeper.

“Black Knight? I haven’t been called that in a tick. Not my favorite days. I missed you, then.” Plaintive, that last; almost subvocal. Crisply enunciated. If anyone else had been present, they would not have commented at all.

Aziraphale heard it, right enough. ‘Right,’ the immortal thinks, ‘best not make it worse by reminding him we met quite often back then. I was not at my best in those days; that my Treasure is still so hurt . . .’ Tamping down his anguish, the angel waits, eyes on his Beloved, listening.

“Coffee’s fine, angel,” they say, straightening and disengaging their left foot from sigil making, long-standing sadness evident in the excessive sibilance of their reply.

Two steps toward Crowley, the angel is out the workroom door; two steps more, a hand on the taller being’s shoulder, another taking theirs. “Come, I’ll put the coffee on. Why don’t you get settled in your spot, dear? Then you can tell me everything!”


	2. Papyrus and Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Crowley feels some joy and the backlash isn't easy for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Passing Reference to Murderous Nazi Behavior Toward LBGTQA+ People during WW2. TAKE CARE OF YOU! DO NOT READ IF THAT WILL HURT YOUR SOUL!
> 
> 2\. A Rod is an Egyptian New Kingdom unit of measure roughly equal to 52.5 meters. The bar was quite far from the church. But it was the closest bar to the church.

Lanky elegance draped in black, accented just so in crimson and gold drifts toward the little sitting room tucked just behind the shop counter. The space is surrounded by bookshelves, smells of all the centuries Crowley recalls. Tongue flicking to taste the air, they judge with alarming accuracy which books on the nearest shelves are from times and places they’ve tasted before. Contained, the Serpent’s internal monologue flows like the Nile.

‘Papyrus on the left. How did he get that? This papyri reminds me of that house just under a **rod*** past the little Coptic church in Alexandria. They served the best beer; a meal and a party in one. That place always was good for some cheering up. Aziraphale was so tired that day. Why was that? Ah, yes! That priest of Anubis had been encouraging his people to harrass the local Christians. Angel’d been negotiating with the elder god for the little congregation’s safety (trying to is more accurate). Something about everyone of the same rank as the Almighty being disrespected and how that was simple wrong relationship. Poor angel never did get further with the jackal headed fellow.’

Golden eyes close a bit for clearer recollection, to fix more cleanly on the scent trigger for this memory. Without opening their eyes, Crowley finds the exact scroll. In less time than it takes to strike, it’s in their hand. The familiar texture of the pounded reed writing surface attacks them with an unexpected vision - Aziraphale wearing a semi-sheer linen garment; the signature style of Egypt’s noble houses during the New Kingdom. The memory knocks the Serpent flat even from a few thousand years’ distance.

“Mine!” The exclamation erupts, as involuntary to the demon as breathing is to humans. What’s new, and so much better, is the awareness that, yes, their Treasure is theirs, truly. The great snake coils, langourous and emphatic, into the overstuffed, velvet upholstered Chesterfield.

“Mine. My Bliss. My Treasure. My Perfect Beauty. My Excess of Bounty. My Delight. My Angel,” they continue, a life-saving, essence-transforming mantra. Joy begins to nudge upward through the natural melancholy attendant to the Fallen. Crowley sits transfixed, scroll in hand. ‘Why am I holding this?’ they wonder, disoriented, eyes unfocused still from the paroxysm of their response to the aesthetic perfection just recalled so sharply.

The occult being’s mind shifts suddenly in time – hard; heading to the dark, as the Fall has made them prone to.

‘ _The Avenging Spirit._ I remember the humans calling Aziraphale that. The only being they felt who loved them, found in them anything worth knowing. The only being who fully believed they were worthy of existence. I know how attached a person can get to that way he has of accepting you as you are and seeing perfection where even God sees failure and blight. An avenging force for love and right relationship, in those days as always. It was Aziraphale who caused the SS butchers to miss queer targets. Together we hid his children, no, OUR children, from the Nazis at every opportunity, with Her churches hindering our work on all sides. The rage and pain on my angel’s face! I’d never seen anything so terrible or so beautiful or so full of RIGHTEOUS WRATH – I thought I knew what that looked like. I was wrong. I’d never seen anyone so transcendent. A being humans would easily decide was worthy of worship, fear, love – all of it; though he’s never seen it that way. And that’s only right. We couldn’t stop the Death Camps happening. If we’d stopped that . . . Oh! if we’d only stopped that! All of Her children would not have suffered and died in numbers, not only our own. We failed to save her Favorites. No wonder She despises us. We hold enough self-loathing for that very cause, and many others, so She need do nothing about it.’

They’d both been drunk for what felt like years after that. Aloud, Crowley mulls, “We lost so many precious souls.” 

'Odd thought for a demon,' the Great Serpent sighs.

“Unpleasant. Unnecessary. On to something BETTER,” they mutter, then, shouting to the sitting room in general, "THINK BETTER!" The bookshelves tremble in time with the shivers of pain in Crowley’s own being.

“Dear?” Aziraphale almost whispers, being deaf neither to the intense adoration recently emitting from his Dearest, nor to Crowley’s words (who could miss all that in such a small shop?).

“Delight? Oh no.” His voice, and his heart, drop. Before his eyes, a literal snake buries it's head in couch cushions.

“Crowley? Dearest, here is your coffee.” Tender, the angel places the black mug with flames that show when there’s something hot inside on the art deco coffee table. Falling into the sofa next to the large cobra. "May I hold you, my dear?"

Vulnerable, the snake's coils shuffle and Aziraphale recognizes assent.

“Memories again, Sweeting? Do you want to talk about it?” so inquiring, the angel collects his Beloved's coils, a lovely flannel tartan lap quilt, and arranges all about his person until everyone is comfortable. Continued refusal to shift to a more human shape suggests that Crowley isn't ready to discuss anything of import just yet.

"Shall I read to you?" he asks.

The snake nods.


End file.
